"If you generate a DALL-E 2 image, is that your artwork?"

Young people are increasingly at ease consuming culture via digital avatars or made with artificial intelligence. Should the same moral guidelines and laws apply to those works?

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The story of FN Meka - a fictitious character billed as the first musical artist partly powered by artificial intelligence to be signed by a major record label - might seem like a bizarre one-off.

In August, Capitol Records dropped FN Meka, whose look, outlaw persona and suggestive lyrics were inspired by real-life music stars like Travis Scott, 6ix9ine and Lil Pump, amid criticism that the project trafficked in stereotypes.

But to seasoned observers of technology in pop music and the debate over cultural appropriation, the rise and fall of this so-called robot rapper, whose songs were actually written and voiced by humans, has raised important questions that are not going away anytime soon.

Last month alone, an A.I. artwork won a prize in Colorado and a computer program improvised a classical music solo in real time in New York City.

From DALL-E 2, the technology that creates visual art on command, to Hatsune Miku, a Japanese software that does something similar for music, the arts world may be on the precipice of a sea change in how its products are created.

And young people feel increasingly at ease consuming culture via digital avatars like FN Meka.

It has already been happening in hip-hop: A hologram of the rapper Tupac Shakur, who died in 1996, performed at a music festival in 2012; Travis Scott gave a concert through his avatar in the video game Fortnite in 2020; and Snoop Dogg and Eminem rapped as their digital selves and their Bored Ape avatars in a metaverse performance at the MTV Video Music Awards last month.

In this brave new world, do fake characters based on real people amount to unseemly borrowing, even theft, or just the kind of homage that has always defined pop music?

Even when artificial intelligence does help write music, should the humans behind it be accountable for the machine-created lyrics?

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